Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Against the background of recent extraordinary narratives of displaced girls, I consider two accounts of refugee girls in Britain at earlier historical moments: Lore Segal's Other People's Houses ([1964] 2018) about her memories of being a Kindertransportee in the late 1930s, and Vesna Maric's Bluebird (2009), a memoir of her journey into refugeehood as a teenage girl following the outbreak of the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s. I read their framing of the refugee experience as interventions into hegemonic scripts of displaced girlhood that ultimately destabilize the wider stories of nationhood that such narratives often uphold. Read through the frames of girlhood and refugeetude, these narratives point to alternative modes of imagining refugee girls and their position in and beyond the nation.

In October 2016, following a campaign led by Labour Peer Lord Alfred Dubs, the first child asylum-seekers allowed entry to the UK under new legislation (the 'Dubs amendment') arrived in England. Their arrival was captured by a heavy media presence, and very quickly doubts were raised by right-wing tabloids and politicians about their age. In this article, I explore the arguments underpinning the Dubs campaign and the media coverage of the children's arrival as a starting point for interrogating representational practices around children who seek asylum. I illustrate how the campaign was premised on a universal politics of childhood that inadvertently laid down the terms on which these children would be given protection, namely their innocence. The universality of childhood fuels public sympathy for child asylum-seekers, underlies the 'child first, migrant second' approach advocated by humanitarian organisations, and it was a key argument in the 'Dubs amendment'. Yet the campaign highlights how representations of child asylum-seekers rely on codes that operate to identify 'unchildlike' children. As I show, in the context of the criminalisation of undocumented migrants', childhood is no longer a stable category which guarantees protection, but is subject to scrutiny and suspicion and can, ultimately, be disproved.

This book presents articles resulting from joint research on the representations of migration conducted in connection with the Erasmus Intensive Programme entitled «Migration and Narration» taught to groups of international students over three consecutive summers from 2010 to 2012. The articles focus on various aspects of the migrant experience and try to answer questions about migrant identity and its representations in literature and the media. The book closes with an original play by Carlos Morton, the Chicano playwright working in the United States